Epiphany Stories

Wondering about the storytellers in a new season

Throughout Advent and into Christmas, I’ve been pondering stories of the women in Jesus’ genealogy. Most of these women are ones I didn’t really know well and their stories are hard to digest. They are hard stories like so many of the stories in so many family trees. We aren’t sure what to do with these stories but in her invitation to ponder to these women Joanna Harader opens a door to a conversation that I felt keenly in the blessing that concludes Bathsheeba’s story:

Siblings, listen:
People will write their own stories about your life — 
             fill in their own motives,
             project their own fears, 
             reach for their own dreams.
Your life — as it turns out — 
             has very little to do with you. 
At least how they tell it.

Excerpted from Joanna Harader’s Expecting Emmanuel

I had to put down my book in reading these few lines. I struck a match and lit a candle for every woman who has had their story told for them and is trying to find a way to narrate their own truth. It’s not just women. There are too many — way too many —that have been told their stories don't matter. Some other voice has dominated and another story has been told.

Today is Epiphany.

Another story unfolds after the Christ Child is born. A story where the gold and frankincense and myrrh come from the East. It is a story where outsiders have to appear with these amazing, lavish gifts for anyone to believe that this is the kind of hope that is bigger than just a tiny baby in Bethlehem.

It is those outsiders that make it possible to believe that light hasn’t just come for some people in one land facing one kind of oppression, but this light of the world has come to shine beyond the borders of any particular nation. It is those outsiders that help us to see that it is our light, not just yours or mine. It’s a gift we get to share because these wise ones came from far away in the East.

In the way that the story is told, this is a moment of clarity. There is no reason to wonder. There are no questions to ask. It’s supposed to be revelatory because the story is that good. It captivates our hope and makes us believe in the amazing.

My eldest daughter is learning to read and has found a new love for stories. She is always carrying around a book and trying to understand the words on the page. With this new revelation, there are a lot of questions. She wants to know why it happened like that. This could have happened instead and it didn’t have to end that way. Something else could have happened.

These are the same questions that I ask in spiritual direction. Together, we are trying to make sense of a story. Those moments of clarity — that we might be bold enough to call epiphanies — come slow. We aren’t always sure what is happening in our stories. We have tons of questions and fiercely want to believe that this is not all that there will be. There has to be more. We want to know how to get there and when it will all make sense.

This is the thing about the wise people that most captivates me this year. They followed this star across the sky until it stopped. And somehow, they knew that was where they were supposed be. They knew enough to follow it and that it would lead them into hope. It fills them with joy. It overflows in that moment of pause because they stopped. They allowed themselves to be awed by something they couldn’t explain and I have to believe that that changed their stories. Those wise people found new ways of talking about hope and joy. It didn’t stop their search. It made them keep looking for it in the stories they told and the stories that were shared with them.

Reflect on what stories from your own life that you have allowed other storytellers to dominate. What happens when you quiet those voices and allow your own voice to recount what you experienced?

Focus on one story from your own life. Maybe it’s the big story about who you are supposed to be and what it is the one thing you are meant to do. Maybe it’s a story that was shared with you from your family history over the holidays. Maybe it’s some other story that doesn’t yet have a clear ending. Practice writing or telling versions of that story. Change the narrator, the verb tense and the storyteller. Are there epiphanies that emerge? Keep telling your story because it matters. It matters so much.